In article ,
says...
In article , lgb wrote:

Apparently most people didn't even know Cobol had a COMPUTE statement.

No, we just *wish* it didn't. Destroys readability. Except for Fortran
programmers. :-)

I'm not sure I agree with that. I could use meaningful names in Cobol
when Fortran was still limited to 6 characters, IIRC.

But the one that *really* doesn't belong in the language is ALTER. One place I
once interviewed at told me that they have only one programming standard in
the shop: use ALTER, get fired.

There you got me. I don't even remember that one. But I didn't do a
lot of Cobol. In fact, a lot of what I did back then was assembler.
Anyone remember the addressing capabilities of the GE400 and 600 series?
I still have fond memories of those.



BTW, I know COBOL gets a lot of bad press, but it's still one of the
easiest languages to get a novice producing working code. Excepting
RPG, of course.

Yeah, but it still takes a long time to get them producing *good* code. :-)

And I do have fond memories of the "MOVE CORRESPONDING" statement.

That's another one that IMO should never be used. It's *far* too easy for
seemingly innocuous changes in the structure of a group item to produce
disaster.

Actually, I used it a lot in one-time programs whose purpose WAS to
change a structure :-).

But if preceded by a comment such as "Extract salary data from personnel
records", I don't think it was that hard to maintain. No, you didn't
want to use it on a highly dynamic structure, but a lot of programs and
data back before disk drives were pretty much cast in concrete after six
months or so - too much hassle to change a lot of tape files.

Anyway, I think we've reminisced about enough - back to woodworking :-).

--
BNSF = Build Now, Seep Forever